Once there was this guy who just loved Cape May. No, he wasn’t interested in Victorian architecture (neither the style nor the Queen was conceived yet). He didn’t surf, he didn’t sunbathe, he didn’t play beach volley ball, he didn’t jog or do all the other things many people do when they come to Cape May today.
He was, never-the-less, enamored with the place, so much so that he made six
trips here.
“Big deal,” you might be thinking. “My relatives descend on me every weekend.”
Well, it was a big deal! Back in the early 1800's, people coming down from Philadelphia didn’t have to sit in Route 55 traffic for several hours, but they would have happily traded this discomfort for the rigors associated with travel at the time.
Bet you’ve never taken a stagecoach from Philadelphia. They stopped service a long time ago. But if you had, chances are you would be reluctant to put yourself thorough the misery again. Unless you, like this guy I’m talking about, are really driven. What was driving him was the ambition to write a book that described all the birds found in the United States of America. It hadn’t been done yet. He wanted to be the first.
Back in the early 1800's, there were a lot of ambitious people in the U.S., in no small part because most of the people who came here arrived with little except their ambition, and because opportunity was essentially boundless.
The guy who loved Cape May was a case in point. He was a Scot who was an avowed Republican (which meant then just about the opposite of what it does today). His political views got him into a little trouble in the old country and, when he got out of the slammer, he hopped ship for the New World and got a teaching job in North Jersey, then took another teaching post outside Philadelphia.
He got into some vague and largely speculative trouble there, too; but well, who’s perfect?
Anyway, Philadelphia was the intellectual capital of North America in those days (the age before professional sports). A guy named Bartram (maybe you’ve seen his name on an exit off Interstate 295) was an authority on birds, plants and natural history and became somewhat of a mentor to the young Scotsman. First the young man studied and painted the birds close to home. Then he began traveling to the Jersey shore. His greatest journey, by boat and by foot, took him down the Mississippi and across Tennessee.
But Cape May held a special place in his heart or, at the very least, he recognized the great wealth of birds housed here. In fact, he once observed that “If birds are good judges of climate then Cape May’s climate must be the finest for it has the greatest variety of birds.”
I don’t know how many birds the young ornithologist shot and painted in Cape May. Don’t be shocked. That’s how people studied birds back then. One bird he did find was a plover that was new to science. Another was a small warbler collected in a maple swamp in the northern part of the county. It was the young ornithologist's custom to name undescribed species after the places they were collected. It was he who discovered and assigned names to the Nashville Warbler, Kentucky Warbler, Mississippi Kite...
And the Cape May Warbler. The bird doesn’t nest here. It is, in fact, fairly uncommon even in migration.
The guy who loved Cape May didn’t finish his ambitious work. He died one book short of a full set. He's buried in Old Swede’s Church in Philadelphia (just off I-295). He is remembered today, as the father of American Ornithology and no, his name is not John James Audubon.
So what’s his name? There’s two ways you can find out. A) You can head up to the Cape May Bird Observatory’s Center for Research and Education on Route 47 near Goshen and find his image on the wall, or; B) you can pick up a bird field guide. Turn to the plovers. Find the one named after him.
The plover he collected in Cape May was named, posthumously, in his honor, by a very close friend.
Whose image is likewise on the wall.
Wilson’s Plover named for Alexander Wilson, Father of American Ornithology, 1766-1813